THE MEDIA BUSINESS

THE MEDIA BUSINESS; For a European Best Seller, a U.S. Taste Test

By SARAH LYALL

Published: March 6, 1995

LONDON, March 4—
It hardly sounds like an automatic winner, or even a book that very many people would want to read. But "Sophie's World," a peculiar Norwegian novel about a teen-ager given a crash course in the history of philosophy by a man who starts leaving sheaves of paper in her mailbox, has become one of the most extraordinary publishing successes in Europe.

In Norway, it has been the No. 1 best seller for more than a year. In Germany, the book has already sold a staggering one million copies in hard cover. "Sophie's World" is on the best-seller lists in Spain, Italy and Korea, and will be published in a total of 33 countries, including Latvia, Brazil and Slovenia. And in Great Britain, where people are thought to be too literal-minded for fuzzy books about metaphysics, the book sailed directly to the top spot on The Sunday Times of London's best-seller list, where it has firmly remained the last two months.

In the process, Jostein Gaarder has become the most successful Norwegian writer since Knut Hamsun, the author of "Hunger," who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. But many people in the publishing industry are puzzled why "Sophie's World" has not done better in the United States.

"I've thought about it a lot, and I just don't know the answer," said Roger Straus, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has seen steady but far from breathtaking sales since it brought the book out in September. "We're literally the only country where it hasn't been a blast-off best-seller."

It is not that "Sophie's World" is a flop in America. According to the publisher, the book is now poised for an eighth printing with a total of about 50,000 copies in print. It has drawn some positive reviews and flickered on and off regional best-seller lists in Boston, Washington and San Francisco.

But that does not mean it is a big deal, particularly in a country where books can sell hundreds of thousands of copies and novels like "Border Music" by Robert James Waller, published to howls of derision from some literary critics, sell as quickly as the latest computer game.

What makes a book succeed in one place and not another is a question that publishers grapple with all the time. In a case like this, it is tempting to slip into one-note cultural generalizations. Germans love abstruse philosophical discussions that take forever; Americans are frivolous and would rather read about aging cowboys than about Plato's cave.

There are grains of truth behind many of these stereotypes, but the picture is more complicated, according to publishers and booksellers who have been watching the triumphal procession of "Sophie's World" through the world's marketplaces.

"There is a historic truth that there is a real resistance to translated books among Americans," said Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, the Farrar, Straus editor who discovered the book during a trip home to Denmark several winters ago. "There's more of an openness in Europe, where the countries are closer."

The size and relative homogeneity of European cultures makes a difference, too, Ms. Dyssegaard said. "In some ways a book becomes a best seller in a slightly different way there," she said, "because the societies are smaller and when everyone starts reading a book, then everyone else does, too."

Roger Katz, the general manager at Hatchards bookstore here in Piccadilly, said he felt there were two possibilities for the relative indifference of Americans to "Sophie's World." "There's a slight difference in taste, we've always said," Mr. Katz said. "And it could be a book that in the States will take off when it goes into paperback. Maybe it will appeal to a younger market, like the people who bought 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' "

"Sophie's World" did not start off as something special. Mr. Gaarder, a former high school teacher, had intended to write a philosophical primer for young adults but abandoned the effort when his prose bored even him. He decided to take his idea -- the history of philosophy from the natural philosophers of ancient Greece to Freud and his pleasure principle -- and encase it in a novel.

And so he created Sophie, a precocious 14-year-old who opens her mailbox one day to find a cryptic document asking two age-old questions: Who are you and where does the world come from? Instead of ripping up the papers and cranking up her Walkman, she embarks on a tour of Western philosophy, learning about people like Spinoza, Locke, Hegel and Kierkegaard.

In the middle of the novel, she meets her philosopher-teacher, the beret-wearing Alberto Knox, and the two stumble into a philosophical thicket when they discover that they may be characters in someone else's story (and, yes, the novel outside the novel is called "Sophie's World").

For a long time Mr. Gaarder had no idea what a gold mine his book was. "I thought it was a book for only a very few people," he said in an interview. "I would have been very pleased if it had sold 2,000 copies." Interestingly enough, it wasn't until the book took off in Germany that its success reverberated back to the home market.

"It seems like Germans just like philosophy as a theme," said Mia Bull-Gundersen, rights manager for the book's Norwegian publisher, Aschehoug.

The book then moved from country to country in a manner that recalls the success some years ago of Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose." Perhaps the biggest surprise was the interest in Great Britain, where philosophy tends to be regarded with about as much enthusiasm as psychotherapy -- not very much, in other words.

But Orion, the British publisher, said the book had already sold about 50,000 copies here, in a country with a population one-fifth that of the United States, and about 20,000 copies in the Commonwealth markets of Australia and New Zealand.

Mr. Straus of Farrar, Straus said Americans were perhaps more interested in books that promise quick pop-culture solutions. "This is a book that, if you read it, you learn much more about the various philosophers than you did before," he said. "But Americans' attitude seems to be, 'Who cares from Socrates?' "